I Have Seen Mamadou N’Diaye

On Thursday, as this great nation came down down with a case of March Madness and uniformly abandoned its cubicles, a quieter moment in collegiate men's basketball unfolded in Seattle's KeyArena. This is a building which has seen precious few men's basketball players grace its hardwood since spindly, 19-year-old Kevin Durant played his rookie NBA season. Above the shuttered concession stands, clunky, standard-def TVs show staticky games from around the country, a reminder that this city is only inhabited, basketball-wise, by ghosts.

But! This weekend, eight of the bracket's 64 teams have arrived in Seattle, and on Thursday they held practices open to the public. There are about as many cameras as people in the arena, with the number of each around 200. Jeans-wearing news reporters bounce about, assembling tournament preview segments to be aired back home in Fargo, Cedar Falls, and Laramie. Windbreaker-bedecked parents greet one another, cheering the most heartbreakingly earnest cheers after their boys finish their sleepy shootarounds. P.J. Carlesimo preps his broadcast table in this, the same building where he was once Durant's head coach. Carlesimo has a pair of jeans pulled about halfway up to his nipples and is positively bubbling with energy as he gathers intel from each team's assistant coaches.

Even with the immaculately coiffed Rick Pitino and presumed first-round draft pick Montrezl Harrell both in the building, though, the day's main feature is undoubtedly the starting center for the University of California-Irvine Anteaters, Mamadou N'Diaye. A cluster of cameras gathers, as if drawn by actual magnetism, near the baseline where he warms up. N'Diaye's modest stats—10.4 points per game in only 14 games played this season—suddenly seem very inconsequential in person. That's because Mamadou N'Diaye is seven feet and six inches tall.

You will be able to tell, on your TV, that N'Diaye is a head taller than everybody else on the basketball court, including the many NBA-caliber prospects that Pitino will throw in his direction during Friday's game. What you might not be able to see on your TV is that the rest of N'Diaye's body has similarly awe-inspiring dimensions. The bills of his shoes come up to around his teammates' calves, and his sneakers look as if they could comfortably fit a second adult's shoe inside of them. N'Diaye's hands swallow nearly the entire ball, palm touching palm on the bottom and fingertips touching fingertips on the top. Something looks funny when he dunks, and then you realize it's because N'Diaye dunks from a walking start, a talent that eludes most every NBA player not named Yao Ming, Shawn Bradley, Manute Bol, or Gheorghe Muresan.

Another thing you might not be able to tell about N'Diaye is that, even though he's 21 years old, he seems old. Not old as in he seems like a 25-year-old, but old in the way he moves: everything he does is slow, methodical, relaxed, easy. His jump shots softly slide through the net—there is no trace of anxiety about the upcoming game against Louisville, much less any self-consciousness about all the eyes locked in on each of his shots.

It's hard for a player to be this tall without their game devolving, somehow, into a gimmick. The most recent such gimmick was Sim Bhullar, 7'5", formerly of New Mexico State and currently of the Reno Bighorns, the hyperspeed avant-garde D-League farm team of the Sacramento Kings. As has been noted before, Bhullar plays basketball with so much underlying solemnity that it looks like playing basketball is his dreary curse. This has not changed even as Bhullar has mostly excelled in his first D-League season. The next such gimmick is probably Tacko Fall, 7'6" high school senior in Florida, who also dominates with sadness and has professed a desire to work for Microsoft, which feels like as big a clue as there can be that basketball is an obligation that eats into time Fall would rather spend coding.

I hope N'Diaye enjoys playing basketball. As draft sage Jonathan Tjarks described earlier this season, there are some close similarities between N'Diaye's collegiate stats and the collegiate stats of current NBA defensive monsters Nerlens Noel and Roy Hibbert. If N'Diaye prospers at the professional level, it will probably be as a defensive specialist: his career Defensive Rating of 90 is indication of a disruptive presence that goes beyond his knack for piling up blocked shots.

Bhullar earned a Summer League invite and a D-League contract when he left his mid-major school after just two seasons, and the same opportunity probably awaits N'Diaye after this season, should he choose to leave Irvine. It's an option that will look increasingly tempting—for NBA teams and N'Diaye alike—especially if N'Diaye and the Anteaters manage to send Pitino, Harrell, and company back to Kentucky on the next flight out of Seattle. Either way, it will be nice to see N'Diaye in a game that's big enough to fit him.